soupie post_id=54808 time= user_id=1542 Wrote:A truly innovative show which still probably hasn’t been given the credit it deserves. I’m not sure what year it started to go off the boil- probably around 1996ish? It certainly went out with a whimper, but all shows like that do eventually- Blind Date, X Factor etc. It’s only really Strictly which currently seems to defy the laws of gravity and is still riding phenomenally high after 17 years.
Noel always said it should have ended with the hundredth show in 1996, and I would probably agree with that, it had already started to go off the boil a bit. I have suggested in the past that it started to go a bit ropey when the pedantic "A BBC Production in association with Unique Television" credit appeared at the end, because as Will Wyatt suggests in his book, much like Chris Evans around the same time, Noel seemed to spend more time arguing about who owned what in the programme rather than what happened in it.
Certainly the first episode of the 1996/97 series was when I knew it was in terminal decline. I remember there was a sequence where Charlton Heston "phoned up" and got to plug his film, and that didn't seem right because until then celebs had appeared either to be in sketches as a character or to be sent up, rather than because they were famous or to promote anything. The same when they started getting bands on it, it never used to be that kind of show, and it made it look like everything else on TV.
As you suggest, shows like this do have a shelf life because they eat ideas at a tremendous rate. Saturday Night Takeaway manages it better because they only have eight shows a year, not 28.
commseng post_id=54809 time= user_id=1125 Wrote:I can't believe that it's over 30 years since I was asked if I could spot where the cameras were in base. I could see myself on a monitor, but there was no obvious camera anywhere nearby.
Eventually by putting my hand near where I thought it could be I worked out it was hidden in a VHS tape, through the record tab hole.
That was the kit that was used for NTV. That's something that couldn't work today with the digital delays in the broadcast systems.
They do something similar on Saturday Night Takeaway with Singalong Live, but as you say, at the start it was absolutely incredible, the bit where Noel clicks his fingers and you're on TV was such a brilliantly simple but hugely effective bit of telly. Of course in the early days such was the power of the concept that it didn't even matter if the punter immediately ran out of the room and didn't come back, as memorably happened on one early episode. Indeed it made it all the funnier, Noel continually crossing back to see if they'd come back ("NTV brings you... empty rooms!").
It started to pall a bit when they started adding all kinds of bells and whistles to it, and doing increasingly elaborate hits. The one where they surprised someone in the cinema was a great example, technically it was amazing but it took so long to set up that when finally did it, all we had was Noel saying "you're on NTV, bye!" and that was it. But you sort of have to keep adding stuff to give you things to promote and show off, regardless of whether it makes the feature itself worse.
